6. Alternatives to High Fantasy PDF

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Reading Questions As you read the reading assignments and discussion that follow, keep the questions below in mind. Make notes as you read and then return to answer these questions more fully.

1. Compare and contrast Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, Charlotte’s Web, and Tuck Everlasting from the perspectives of ○ central characters ○ setting ○ main conflict(s) ○ theme(s) ○ Style

Tuck Everlasting Central Characters Jesse, the 17 year old, is the only member of the Tuck family who views everlasting life as a gift. Being the most adventurous of the bunch, he wants to accomplish great things and see the world. However, he has learned that immortality has consequences, as his family is extremely lonely. Jesse is excited that Winnie shares in their secret and hopes that someday, she will drink the water and join him as his wife on his adventures At the beginning of the story, Winnie foster is frustrated and feels the need to escape her home and find an adventure. When she finds Jesse Tuck, she falls in love immediately, but her practical side assesses the situation and determines that his entire family is crazy whent hey kidnap her and tell her a tale of having eternal life. Even though she doesn’t really believe them, she falls in love with each one of them.

Winnie shows her loyalty to the Tucks when she lies to the constable and claims that she willingly came to the Tuck home. Further devotion to the Tucks is indicated when Winnie helps Mae escape jail. Winnie accepts a bottle of spring water from Jesse, who hopes that she will drink it when she is his age so they can be married. However, Winnie is too practical to choose to live eternally. She marries, has children, and dies at the age of 78. The Man in the Yellow suit carries the central conflict of the story with him, but that isn’t all he does. He is the antagonist and the villain. He is also a symbol of the selfish, greedy side of humanity. His Character is revealed in his movements, his insincere words, and his plan for the water. In Tuck Everlasting, greed and selfishness do not prevail, and neither does the man in the yellow suit. Loyalty, friendship and the greater good are stronger. Miles is the opposite of Jesse in his approach to life and immortality. He provides an example for Winnie of a socially responsible, caring individual who has vowed to do good things with his endless life. Jesse’s playful and carefree attitude charms Winnie, but Miles’s steady and empathetic example is what resonates with her. She passes up Jesse’s offer of an eternity of travel and fun and instead has the strength to choose the path that feels more right to her. Without Miles, Winnie would have missed out on the empathy and comfort he offers while she is with the Tucks. He is a quiet force in the background of dramatic scenes. He works hard to be useful, cares for his family and Winnie, balances Jesse’s influence on her, and provides an example of strength of character that Winnie will follow at the end of the novel. Mae Tuck pragmatically accepts that her family will never age and doesn’t complain about it. She enjoys the time they have together as a break from the loneliness of being a Tuck. When Winnie Foster discovers the secret of their youth is the spring, Mae panics and kidnaps Winnie, but she is able to ease Winnie’s fears and soon they grow to love one another. When the stranger arrives and tries to take Winnie, Mae reacts instinctively by hitting him on the head and killing him. She is arrested and will likely be hanged, which will not work because she can’t die. To prevent others from learning their secret, the Tucks break Mae out of jail. She returns many years later to find that Winnie has lived a full life and

died. Setting Setting is defined as time or place and helps the reader paint a picture of a story in their head. Where one lives often affects what they are like as a person. In the case of TE, the setting provides insight into the character’s feelings and thoughts. Most importantly, the setting in this book helps explain the Tucks’ decision to live forever. In Tuck Everlasting, the setting helps paint a picture of Winnie before and After she meets the Tucks. Her life is very orderly, her parents are overbearing, while she, much like the weather in August, is stagnant. She runs away, which leads her to the spring and the Tuck family. The Tucks are the opposite of her family - disorderly, messy, yet comfortable and inviting. They also happen to be immortal. Main Conflicts Themes Growing up: Winnie Foster is tired of the stifling control of her mother and grandmother in their perfect, orderly, “touch-me-no” house. She knows she wants something different for herself, and she longs for freedom to become who she wants to be. Winnie ventures outside of the realm of the fenced yard and civilization to explore the woods. When she returns home after her adventures, she has made difficult, adult decisions, known love, loyalty, and loss, and is no longer a child. Civilization vs. Nature: Winnie is fenced inside of the civilized world, on the edge of the woods. The Foster Family owns the forest, but they don’t come close to understanding it. Civilization takes the form of the man who would like to bottle and sell the immortality-water from the spring int he woods. At the beginning of the novel, nature protects the spring from people because the cows choose to walk around the forest rather than through it. At the end of the novel, nature protects the spring from people through the destruction caused by the forest fire. Time and Death: IF you could live forever, would you? There’s no easy answer to a question like this. While Winnie chooses her own path, yours might be different. Except in stories, no one can escape the flow of time toward death. Through fantasy, Tuck Everlasting allows us to contemplate whether or not we would live forever if we could. Tuck tell Winnie that life is “moving, growing, changing…” and that “dying is part of the wheel, right there next to being born”.

Love, Loyalty, and Family: Winnie wants to get away from her mother and grandmother, but when she is with the tucks, she begins to miss them. When she understands how much the Tucks care for her, she begins to worry for them and wants to protect them. She refuses to say she was kidnapped and instead insists she is with them by choice. After the sacrifice she makes to set Mae Tuck free, Winnie feels sorry for the trouble it causes her family. They eventually accept Winnie’s explanation: the Tucks were her friends. She had done it because - in spite of everything, she loved them. This, her family understood, and drew together staunchly around her. Her family is loyal to her because they love her. Style The author uses figurative language to create memorable images for the reader. These figures of speech are used when the author describes significant people, places, and concepts in the novel. Some of the main figures of speech used here are similes (the man in the yellow suit - “like a well-handled marionette), personification, irony (the man in the yellow suit refers to the Tucks as being selfish, however it is him that is being selfish by wanting to sell the water for a profit, disregarding the impact immortality would have on the world) and metaphors.

Charlotte’s Web Considered a Coming of age story because the characters grow up over the course of the book. Fern grows from a young child doting on Wilbut to almost a teenager who becomes interested in boys. Wilbur grows from a runt to an adult pig who can be trusted with the important job of caring for Charlotte’s egg sac. Central Characters Wilbur - the story’s main character, is born the runt of the litter of pigs and thought too weak to live until Fern takes pity on him. He’s full of life and curious about the world around him and loves his friends and his

barnyard life. When he first learns his fate, he cries, and the other animals tease him because they think him foolish for not understanding his place, but with the help fo C, he manages to avoid being slaughtered. Charlotte: a barn spider who lives on a web above wilbur’s pigpen. She becomes like another to lonely Wilbur, telling him stories and signing to him, and teaching him about life and the loyalty of friendship Templeton is a greedy rate who agrees to help Charlotte find messages to write about wilbur in her web. However, he does so only when C convinces him that keeping wilbut alive will benefit him because as long as W lives, Templeton can eat the food from his trough, Fern Arable: 8YO girl who lives the animals that she grows up around and becomes sad when her father decides to slaughter Wilbur. She’s kind and gentle, and when she goes to visit wilbur after he moves to her uncles farm, all the animals come to trust and love her as W does. She sits quietly on a milk stool with the sheep at her feet, listening to the sounds of nature. She’s an important character because she’s the only one who can hear the animals talk, and she represents the vivid child imagination and the magic of seeing nature through a child’s eyes. Setting Setting - includes both time and place in which the story happens. Countryside - can tell by the clues in the story; uncle farm; county fair You can use clues in your reading to figure out the setting (time and place) of a story. CW was set on a farm in the country around 1930-1950. Main Conflicts Conflict occurs when two characters are struggling against each other. It is this conflict that makes the story interesting. External conflict, a character is being kept from meeting his goal by another character or an outside force, such as law of belief. Fern vs. Society: When Fern finds out that her father plans to kill W because he is small and weak. If F had not challenged society;s way of doing things, W would have been killed as a baby, and the rest of the story would not have happened. Charlotte vs. Mr. Zuckerman: (external) When C is determined to save W

from being killed by Mr. Z. C weaves words into her web to trick the humans into thinking that W is special. Internal conflict - a character “battles” himself. Often this battle occurs because the character does not have confidence. Wilbur battling against himself - his lack of confidence almost keeps him from getting what he wants. Themes the theme of friendship is seen through Wilbur;s relationships with others. Through the Character’s relationships, you learn that friendships can happen unexpectedly. Additionally, the events of the story help prove that friends are dependable and will be there no matter what -Friendships can be unexpected -Friends are dependable Life and death are presented as a natural part of like, esp life on a farm, where smaller, weaker animals are slaughtered. Charlotte dedicates herself to saving Wilbur from his impending demise, even as her own life is ending. W learns to accept death as a natural part of life, and in the process learns to value life and friendship Style Narrator in third person. Omniscient narration, which means the narrator knows everything. Descriptive writing - feel the change in the seasons, the smell of the barn, the noises of the animals. Repetition: repeating certain words to emphasize a feeling or make appoint.

Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang

Central Characters Setting Main Conflicts Themes Style

2. Analyze the quest motif in Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang. Is there a quest motif in Tuck Everlasting and Charlotte’s Web?

3. Is there a primary and secondary world in Charlotte’s Web? Compare and contrast Charlotte’s Web to The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe from this perspective.

While here is no magical secondary world in Charlotte’s Web, the secondary world is the barnyard, where animals are able to think and talk like humans. In comparison to The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe...

4. Analyze the relationships between life, death, and love in

Charlotte’s Web and Tuck Everlasting. 5. Analyze the relationship between the “real” (frame) world and the dream (fantasy) world in Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang.

6. Analyze the attitudes to grown-ups in Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang and Charlotte’s Web.

7. How would you categorize Tuck Everlasting, Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, and Charlotte’s Web according to the categories of fantasy described by Russell in Literature for Children?

8. Fantasy literature often conveys a message about morals. What distinguishes the methods used in fantasy to convey this message from the methods used in didactic tales? What would you say the message is in each of the fantasies studied in this lesson?

Didactic literature: any verse or prose work intended to be instructional.

Introduction In the last lesson, we looked at examples of high, heroic, or secondary-world fantasy. In this lesson, we will examine three works that fall outside the category of heroic fantasy. Since each contains an element of the nonrational, however, we will still classify them as fantasy, although Tymn, Zahorski, and Boyer might not agree in all instances. With Charlotte’s Web, Tuck Everlasting, and Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, we move out of the secondary worlds of quests and heroes and into a different form of fantasy. We have seen that in Fantasy Literature: A Core Collection and Reference Guide, Tymn, Zahorski, and Boyer group the different categories of fantasy into two main branches: high fantasy and low fantasy. The primary feature that differentiates high from low fantasy is setting: high fantasy takes place in secondary (imaginary) worlds replete with nonrational phenomena, whereas low fantasy is set in the real or primary world and makes limited use of the nonrational. The works we will study in this lesson are examples of low fantasy, the type of fantasy more commonly read in the elementary grades. E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web is an animal fantasy set primarily on what at first glance seems to be an ordinary farm. The nonrational enters in, however: animals talk, and a spider weaves words into her web to save the life of a pig. The world of the humans and that of the animals is clearly delineated; Fern is the only character who, to some degree, can move between these two worlds. Properly speaking, Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting does not have a secondary world since it contains a single fantastic element: the water of eternal life. Mordecai Richler’s Jacob Two-Two is like Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in that it is a dream fantasy. In Lesson 4 we saw that, while Tymn et al. exclude dream visions from the genre of true fantasy, they nonetheless classify Carroll’s works as fantasy because the rational explanation of the dream frame is of minor consequence and the nonrational elements dominate. Tymn et al. would probably exclude Jacob Two-Two from the genre of true fantasy because of the importance of the dream element: Richler uses Jacob’s life at home to form a direct

parallel to his adventures on Slimers’ Isle.

Origins of Animal Fantasy In order to understand the tradition out of which writers like White were creating their stories, let’s begin by looking at the background of animal fantasy. Animal fantasy has its roots in the stories of animals that populate folklore, just as high fantasy has its roots in the stories of heroes and quests. Such brothers Grimm tales as “The Bremen Town Musicians” or “Cat and Mouse in Partnership” depict animal characters interacting with one another. These are not tales in which the animals function as helper figures to the hero but are stories in which animals with animal traits are the primary characters. Outside the European tradition, animals appear also in the oral traditions of other cultures, such as African, Australian, and the Indigenous peoples of North and South America. In such cultures, animal stories often purport to explain how that animal came to be or to acquire a particular characteristic: for example, how the bear lost his tail or how the crow lost his beautiful voice. Such stories are pourquoi in form and offer explanations of natural phenomena. Like animal stories of the European variety, they often depict animals in relation to one another. Other animal characters are the main actors in a series of stories from a particular cultural group: for example, Anansi among the African peoples, Raven among the Haida of the west coast, or Coyote among the plains peoples of North America. Anansi, Raven, and Coyote are often as adversarial as they are helpful, and usually exist outside the moral world of the story.

In Europe, animal stories formed part of the early tradition of children’s literature. As

we saw in Lesson 1, early works for children involving animals included Reynard the Fox and Aesop’s Fables published by Caxton in the fifteenth century. The English Reynard is derived from a variety of European cycles that describe the exploits of a cunning fox. They were meant as a satirical commentary on human society. The fables of Aesop were Greek in origin, and include a series of stories involving animal characters that act out human behaviour for the sake of a particular lesson. One such fable that most children are familiar with is “The Fox and the Grapes,” in which a fox decides that a juicy bunch of grapes that is just out of reach is not worth getting after all. It is this fable that has given rise to the expression “sour grapes.” The medieval bestiaries were similarly rooted in Latin and Greek sources. They are the earliest recorded attempt at natural history. The bestiaries first made an appearance in England during the twelfth century and were based on Greek and Latin works of natural history, chiefly the Physiologus, a compilation of thirty-nine to forty-nine accounts of plants and animals, some real and some fabulous, possibly in turn derived from ancient Egyptian and Indian folklore. The intent of the medieval bestiaries was to impart Christian virtues through text and illustrations. The stories were added to and changed over the centuries as their popularity grew throughout Europe and England.

Modern Animal Fantasy In Lesson 4, we briefly mentioned Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. This work centres on an anthropomorphic collection of animal characters with their comfortable homes and picnic lunches. The world of Grahame’s riverbank is idyllic. A sense of nostalgia overlays the entire text, serving as a counterpoint to the sense of

dread most of the animals share about the wide world, the world of men beyond the wood. Even though Grahame’s animals bear a striking resemblance to gentlemen of the English country gentry, he does pay tribute to his animals as animals when he describes in lush detail the sense that comes upon the creatures of the riverbank when summer is ending and autumn is beginning. Although not entirely typical of animal fantasy in the twentieth century, Grahame’s text helped to break the ground for the depiction of animals and their concerns as separate from those of humans. Animal stories for children became immensely popular as the twentieth century progressed. Today stories about animals can most often be found in picture-book form. Popular series such as the Berenstain Bears, Franklin the turtle, and those two hippos George and Martha, are representative of such picture books. Another book-length animal fantasy is George Selden’s The Cricket in Times Square. Selden’s book is much like Charlotte’s Web in that the animals—in this case a cricket, a mouse, and a cat—are trying to live in the midst of a human community (a newsstand in a New York city subway station) and are entirely subject to the habits and decisions of the people around them. Many animal fantasies make an effort to maintain some consistency with the natures of the animals they depict. One of the most consistent is Richard Adams’s Watership Down, which tells the story of a group of rabbits living entirely within their own habitat. A band of rabbits, led by Hazel, Fiver, and Big Wig, run away from their warren and cross the English countryside in search of a home. Just...